This is another installment of FootNotes, a regular series of conversations with authors of recent works of NYC history. Today’s interview is with Alice Elliott, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, about her new documentary Miracle on 42nd Street. This interview was conducted by Adam Tanaka, a PhD candidate in urban planning at Harvard whose research focuses on affordable housing. Tanaka is currently working on a documentary about Co-op City in the Bronx.

Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de BlasioBy Thomas J. MainNYU Press (2016), 288 pg.

Reviewed by Ariel Eisenberg

In the conclusion to Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio, Thomas J. Main writes that he, like many housed New Yorkers, first became aware of homelessness in the early 1980s when he encountered homeless people in the city’s public places. It is the visibility of the homeless – the ubiquitous presence of people living on sidewalks, in parks, and in transportation terminals – that has made them the focus of so much attention in New York City, from the late 1970s to the present day. The conundrum, as Main presents it, is that, despite the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who experience homelessness yearly, and the millions more who encounter homeless people daily, “homelessness politics in the city has mostly been made on behalf of the homeless, not by them” (202). While this analysis diminishes the role that housed New Yorkers and homeless people themselves played in shaping the city’s response to homelessness, Main seeks here to examine the growth of the city’s vast homeless services apparatus. As his book demonstrates, many of the most dramatic initiatives were the work ofa relatively small number of actors, almost all of whom were legal advocates and elected or appointed government officials.

“Come on in, we’re home!” The welcoming red sign on the door stood in stark contrast with the similarly minimalist galleries on the block. But this wasn’t your typical gallery, at least not between June 7 and July 9, when the Mitchell-Innes and Nash Gallery on West 26th Street in Chelsea became the “Temporary Office of Urban Disturbances” for If You Can’t Afford to Live Here Mo-o-ve! a new iteration of Martha Rosler’s decades-long exploration of housing, homelessness, and urban conditions in New York City and beyond.

Today on Gotham, historian Mason B. Williams interviews Shannon King ​about his new book Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

Few, if any, New York neighborhoods have been studied as intensively as Harlem, and no period in Harlem’s history has received as much attention as the Roaring Twenties. In his debut book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, the historian Shannon King shows us a less familiar, yet more representative and perhaps ultimately more telling, side of interwar Harlem. In place of the tales of towering intellectuals, brilliant artists (and their canny boosters), and “the making of a ghetto,” King shines a light on the grassroots struggles — with police, landlords, and employers — which collectively “comprised the fulcrum of Harlem’s political culture” and paved the way for the remarkable upsurge of protest politics of the 1930s and 1940s. An associate professor of history at the College of Wooster, King is also a native New Yorker, raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. A Scholars-in-Residence fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture allowed him to return to Harlem to conduct research for Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Our conversation touched upon the usefulness of the concept of “community rights” in thinking about the Black freedom struggle in the interwar North; the role of gender in shaping grassroots activism; and King’s brilliant analysis of the effect of Prohibition on Harlem’s community politics. Ultimately, King says, he wanted to give the people who waged struggles for justice in 1920s Harlem the recognition they deserved. There is no question that he has done that. And in recasting those struggles as part of a campaign for community rights, he has filled in a crucial part of the history of Black politics, both in New York and beyond. — Mason Williams